Takeaways from Florida’s dramatic national championship win over Houston | College Basketball by Chris Harry
Nicole Auerbach and Jordan Cornette break down Florida’s national championship win over Houston, explaining how the Gators were able to defeat the Cougars for their third national title.
How were the Florida Gators going to contend with the top-rated, tenacious, and bullying defense of the second-ranked Houston Cougars? That was one of the lead narratives going into Monday night’s NCAA Tournament title game.
As it turned out, the question was phrased backward.
It was the Gators’ defense that flipped the script – and the scoreboard – in keying a second-half rally from a dozen points down to stun the Cougars 65-63 in a white-knuckle, down-to-the-last-second national championship final that had 66,000-plus at the Alamodome on the edge of their seats. When the final, frantic seconds ticked away, third-ranked UF had completed an improbable come-from-behind victory — yeah, another one — for the third national title in program history and first since famously going back-to-back 2006-07.
They did it in just the third season under Coach Todd Golden, who not only restored the program to the national prominence established two decades ago by Hall-of-Famer Billy Donovan, but became the youngest coach to win a national championship since North Carolina State’s Jim Valvano in 1983. And while few outside the Florida family would have predicted the game to unfold the way it did, Golden’s Gators showed time and again during this remarkable 2024-25 season that they were never out of a game and that they could play – and win – any kind of game. To read more, go to the link below:
